With Visibility We Can...

Identify the biggest problems

Make the case to management for improvement

Create a feedback loop to learn what works

Conquer even the hardest challenges

IDEA FLOW

How to Measure the PAIN in Software Development

By Janelle Klein

A modern strategy for systematically optimizing software productivity with a data-driven feedback loop. By measuring the pain or “friction” in developer experience, we can identify the biggest problems, understand the causes, and run experiments to systematically learn what works. It’s data-driven software mastery.

What is Open Mastery?

Open Mastery is a free to join industry peer mentorship network focused on data-driven software mastery. Rather than relying on gut feel to make improvement decisions, we measure the pain, break down the causes, and identify the biggest problems with data.

One of the biggest challenges in the software industry is the inability to measure the cost impact of “technical debt”, or explain why these costs should matter to the business. Developer pain doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. At Open Mastery, we’re working together to invent solutions to these age-old problems based on new standards for data collection based on Idea Flow, and building next-generation developer insight tools inspired by the combination of Idea Flow and Lean Manufacturing to support process control, supply-chain optimization and throughput accounting for software organizations.

Our mission is to fill the world with awesome companies by empowering the people in our community with modern developer insight tools, an industry support network, and the skills needed for success.

How It Works

We believe that problems get solved by putting the pain on center stage, so we’re making the pain visible on our software projects. We dig into the causes of pain as a community, work together to find strategies for improvement, and distill the lessons learned into patterns and principles.

STEP 1

Create an Open Mastery Circle

STEP 2

Identify Your Biggest Pains

STEP 3

Join our Guild Problem-Solving Discussions

STEP 4

Learn Your Way to Awesome

How do we implement a data-driven learning process on our team? How do we identify the biggest problems to solve? How do we get traction around improvements? Well, we iterate!

Rather than a big-bang approach to organizational transformation, we built a detailed iterative roadmap for incrementally introducing process and learning infrastructure, so we can achieve measurable improvements, one small victory at a time. “Open Mastery Learning Framework” is the organizational continuous improvement framework that sits on top of the developer insight analytic tools platform.